94 Boulevardier - - "'ow 2 ... .. .. ,.,. ? ''"1" / . W' fv \ .,:"s: · /Jf; , ' \ þ -: - ,, , 1 :; t f,. / t IJ I ...J - LJJ Z ü 2 a::: LJJ I FLORSHEIM r- Sophisticated. Urbane Chic. Dina from Florsheim, in gold, brown, navy or black kidskin $38 Additional $2 charge for sizes over 10 Fifth at 43rd . Madison at 54th. Third at 70th PLaza 9-4805 And at other fme locations throughout the country mcludmg Riverside Square. Paramus Fashion Center Boylston Street. Montgomery Mall Water Tower Place · Northbrook Court Bal Harbour. Post and Grant. The Galiena trary, are never pleasing to the eye. Once forced into view, they look as though they had been thrown together piecemeal, and, unless they are de- formed by disease or some peculiar ahnormality, they appear alike; not even the various animal species, let alone individuals, are easy to tell froin each other by the mere inspection of their intestines. When Portmann de- fines life as "the appearance of an in- side in an outside," he seems to fan victim to the very views he criticizes: the point of his own findings is that \vhat appears outside is so hopelessly different from the inside that one can hardly say that the inside ever appears at an. The inside, the functional appara- tus of the life process, is cov- ered up by an outside which, as far as the life process is concerned, has only one function, namely, to hide and protect it, to prevent its exposure to the lIght of an appearing world. If thIs inside were to appear, we would all look alike. There is, second, the equally im- pressive evidence for the eXIstence of an innate impulse-no less compelling than the merely functional instinct of preservation-that Portmann calls "the urge to self-display" ( Selbstdarstel- lung). This instinct is entirely gratu- itous in terms of life-preservation; it far transcends what may be deemed necessary for sexual attraction. These findings suggest that the predominance of outside appearance implies, in addi- tion to the sheer receptivity of our senses, a spontaneous activity: what- rver can see wants to be seen, whatever can hear calls out to be heard, whatever can touch presents aself to be touched. I t almost seems, indeed, that everything that is alive-in addi60n to the fact that its surface IS made for appearance, fit to be seen and meant to appear to others-has an urge to appear, to fit itself into the world of appearances by showing and displaying not its "inner self" but itself as an individual. (The word "self-display," like the German Selbstdarstellung, is equivocal: it can mean that I actively make my pres- ence felt, seen, and heard, or that I display my self, something inside me that would otherwise not appear at all-that is, in Portmann's terminology, an "inauthentic" appearance. In the following, we shaH use the word in the first meaning.) It is precisely this self- display, quite prominent already in the higher forms of animal life, that reaches its climax in the human species. Portmann's morphologIcal reversal of the usual priorities has far-reaching consequences, which he himself, how- ever--perhaps for very good reasons- does not elaborate It points to what he calls "the value of the surface;" that IS, to the fact that "the appearance shows a maximum power of expression compared with the internal, whose functions are of a more primitive or- der." The use of the word "expres- sion" makes clear the terminological difficulties that an elaboration of the consequences is bound to encounter. For an "expression" cannot but express something, and to the inevitable ques- tion "\Vhat does the expression ex- press?" (that is, press out) the answer will always be "Something inside" -an idea, a thought, an emotion. The expressiveness of an appear- ance, however, is of a differ- ent order: it "expresses" nothing but itself; that is, it exhibits or displays. From Portmann's findings it follows that our habitual standards of judg- ment, so firmly rooted in metaphysical assumptions and prejudices-according to which the essential lies beneath the surface, and the surface is "super- ficial" -are wrong; that our common conviction that what is inside us, our "inner life," is more relevant to what "" h h h we are t an w at appears on t e out- side is an illusion But when It comes to correcting these fallacies, it turns out that our language-or, at least, our terminological discourse-fails us. B ESID ES, the difficulties are far from being merely terminological. They are intimately related to the problematic beliefs we hold with regard to our psychic life and the relationship of soul and body . To be sure, we are inclined to agree that no bodily inside ever appears authentically, of its own accord, but If we speak of an inner life that is expressed in outward appearance, we mean the bfe of the soul, and the inside-outside relation that is true for our bodies is not true for our souls, even though we speak of our psychic life and its location "inside" ourselves in meta- phors obviously drawn from bodily data and experiences. The same use of meta- phors, måreover, is characteristic of our conceptual language, designed to make manifest the life of the mind: the words we use in strictly philosoph- ical discourse are also invariably de- rived from expressions originally re- lated to the world as it is given to our five bodily senses, from whose expen- enCe they are then, as Locke pOInted " f d " h . out, trans erre --mrta-p erezn, to " b . fi carry over- to more a struse sIgnI - cations, and made to stand for ideas that